Let’s Play COMMUNICATES (Choosing Your Character)

It’s very likely you’ve played a variety of games and sports growing up.

At times you might feel that you are playing a much larger game called ‘The Game of Life’.

In this game of life, you’ve experienced some wins and some losses. Sometimes it was easy, and sometimes you faced some challenging obstacles that you worked hard to overcome.

There were moments you were bored and some moments where you had great adventures that you can now cherish as memories. You might’ve learned and found that playing the game of life is all about trying to have fun, and not to take things too seriously at times.

However, in some games there is a game within a game.

Within a game of life there is a game that I call ‘COMMUNICATES: Becoming A Communication Warrior’ (or COMMUNICATES for short).

In COMMUNICATES there are 12 different components and objectives that you go through.

So, each month I will share each of the components and objectives to becoming a communication warrior.

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Setting up the Game In COMMUNICATES

First, to start any game we need to know the characters.

C: Choose Your Character

When playing a game, you generally choose a character or game piece you want to play. Sometimes the character or game piece is chosen for you.

In this communication game you are the character, and you can choose how you want to play your character.

Sometimes due to the communication situation or the person you are speaking with, the character is chosen for you.

For example, perhaps you have in mind that you would like to be the confident speaker, but due to the conversation topic, situation or who you’re talking to, you have been put in the role of the timid character.

Depending on the communication situation and the other characters you interact with you can choose to be the peacemaker, negotiator, educator, the confident speaker, timid and shy, aggressor, and the list goes on.

And your specific role is chosen for you.

Just like in any game with pieces, there are no good or bad game pieces.

Therefore in the COMMUNICATES game there is no good or bad character.

All the characters are necessary and play an important part in communication. However, if you feel stuck playing a communication character that you don’t want to be, know that you can learn to shift out of that role.

For example, if you are usually shy and timid, feel stuck being shy and timid and would instead like to be a confident speaker, and don’t think you can or know how, know that you can shift out of the shy and timid communicator and be the confident speaker that you wish to be by being open-minded and be willing to have a growth mindset.

The first place to start is to think of a confident speaker you admire and start to mimic various gestures, words, and tonality that the speaker uses.

You are not going to copy the speaker you admire, but you can certainly borrow their gestures, words, and tone making them your own to help build your confidence.

If you’re not good at negotiating and would like to become a better negotiator, then you can follow some people who are good at negotiating or read books about it so you can start to emulate some of the words and actions to make them your own so you can then start becoming a better negotiator.

The point is that some people may have been born being able to speak confidently or be great negotiators, peacemakers or storytellers. Others became better at speaking confidently, negotiating, peacemaking, storytelling, etc. through coaching, practice, following some of the people they admire and borrowing from what they saw and learned.

The Communication Warrior did not happen overnight, but it did happen over time.

Whether you specifically chose the communication character or not, you can choose how you want to portray said character in your communication.

The Objective of the Game

The ‘winning’ objective is that you portray who you want to portray and you’re happy with the outcome.

In other words, if you are in a meeting and you want to portray a confident speaker who speaks up for your opinions, ideas, and confidently shares your thoughts with others in the room without worrying what they think, you can. If you feel you have succeeded in what you wanted to accomplish, then that is a win.

If you held back and wished you might have done some things differently, but overall felt good about it then it’s still a win.

If you totally held back, lost your nerve, and kept your opinions and ideas to yourself even though you wanted to share but were too afraid to, well guess what?

You learned without losing.

I should point out that in the communication game there’s winning and there’s learning (no losing in this game).

Learning points in this example might be why did you hold back? What are your fears? Why do have these fears? What can you do next time? What can you change?

You earn bonus points when you’re bold and step into the authenticity of the character you want to portray in your communication.

This is the Communication Warrior.

In the early part of the objective, you might have been timid and shy and wanted to change so you made a decision to stand up tall and straight, then you started to climb up the mountain by studying and practicing and you finally reached the mountain to become the Communication Warrior. The Communication Warrior communicates authentically their thoughts, feelings, and desires without feeling overwhelmed, overshadowed and overlooked.

You know your character…

Now Go Play and Have Fun Communicating!